December 2011 – HumanaNatura

Natural Lessons of Vitamin B12

December 28, 2011

By Mark Lundegren

Sometimes little things can teach us a lot, if we remain attentive and curious.

A recent New York Times article by Jane Brody, It Could Be Old Age Or It Could Be Low B12, highlights that elderly people can be misdiagnosed with early Alzheimer’s disease or dementia, when they are instead exhibiting a similar pattern of symptoms owing to chronic vitamin B12 deficiency.

While a cause for concern, the important lessons from our potential for a deficit of vitamin B12 extend well beyond the care of ourselves and others in elderhood. Consider these three:

Lesson #1: Perhaps the most important practical lesson of our risk of a Vitamin B12 shortfall is the importance of ensuring a vitamin-rich daily diet and that we are able to make use of the vitamins we eat by ensuring our natural physiological health. Though many of us fail on one or both counts, we actually can do each of these things quite simply through Natural Eating, which ensures a robust vitamin intake and eliminates harmful foods from our diet that compromise our health, and by adequate Natural Exercise, which encourages our tissues and chemistry to make the most of a healthy natural diet.

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Veggies Mostly For Optimal Health

December 26, 2011

Yummy quartered veggie omelet with lots of greens, a few berries, and diced orange pieces…epitomizing naturally healthy salad meal eating, with a little animal protein and fat but mostly raw vegetables and fruits. This delicious meal is garnished with pistachios, parsley, paprika, anise, and red and black pepper. Really good!

Learn how to make delicious salad meals like this via the Meals tab above or our popular article Perfect Salad Meals. And explore our science-based guidelines for healthy natural nutrition through the Natural Eating section of HumanaNatura’s comprehensive Personal Health Program.

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Solstice Walk Into The New Year

December 23, 2011

Need inspiration to get out and exercise more, or to experience nature more deeply? This great solstice hiking photo from one of our member’s might help. It was taken yesterday in hills just west of Los Angeles, and is a reminder that getting into nature is often harder than being there. Once we return to natural life, the world pulls and inspires us with its ancient beauty, and helps us to find our own beauty and place in the world.

Learn about natural exercise the HumanaNatura way via the Fitness tab above or our popular article Stepping Out. And explore your potential for new and lasting natural fitness through the Natural Exercise section of HumanaNatura’s comprehensive Personal Health Program.

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Solstice Feast – Big & Healthy

December 22, 2011

An amazing mix of foods makes for an extraordinary salad meal, one that is in keeping with HumanaNatura principles for Natural Eating. This meal begins with pan-cooked curry fish, pork, and red and green onions, and is combined with a bed of arugula, julienne cucumbers, and sliced cherry tomatoes. It’s topped off with diced orange, pistachios, parsley, coriander, and black pepper. A great way to ring in the natural new year!

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HumanaNatura Solstice Wishes!

December 21, 2011

Greetings from HumanaNatura at the solstice! In the natural year, today is the beginning of the new year in the north and its mid-point and height in the south. In both cases, we are halfway between the relative balance and calm of the spring and fall equinoxes, when HumanaNatura encourages review and renewal of our Natural Life Plan.

At the solstice, HumanaNatura instead encourages life and health-affirming celebration, in an ancient human rhythm that has its roots before recorded history. In this way, we act to powerfully balance ourselves between reflection and action, thought and feeling, and self and others.

Our newest member newsletter was released today as well, which is published eight times yearly in harmony with the natural year. To receive future HumanaNatura newsletters and learn about the benefits of membership in our global practitioner-advocate network, go to Join HumanaNatura.

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Sugar Science is Health-Critical

December 19, 2011

By Mark Lundegren

By now, nearly everyone on the planet understands that high sugar consumption may not be good for us. If this point seems no longer worthy of mention, we would encourage you to reconsider.

After all, not very long ago many of us were skeptical of sugar’s health risks, just as some of us are still, offering an important lesson about our perceptions generally. And in our time, even with our new sugar misgivings, commercial interests still actively tout sugar’s dubious benefits, blithely characterize extensive research suggesting toxicity and harm from high sugar consumption as less than credible, and quietly lobby for continued public policies friendly to sugar producers.

Modern Sugar In Four Of Its Many Familiar Forms

But more important than the past and present-day denial of sugar risks is the fact that, for a majority of us, our daily life still involves enormous and unnatural sugar consumption, in both direct and indirect forms (such as carbohydrate-rich grains and foods with added sugars).

Our behavior, in other words, generally runs counter to our growing belief about the harm of high-sugar diets, with sugar consumption (including high fructose sweeteners) still on the rise worldwide. A world leader in added or free sugar use (and obesity and other diseases of affluence) is the United States, where average added sugar consumption is now about 40 kilograms (90 pounds) per person annually. Unfortunately, other nations are not far behind.

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Warm & Sunny Autumnal Salad

December 18, 2011

As the winter solstice approaches in the north, it’s time to add new light and bring the south to our meals and lives. This delicious autumnal salad combines spicy pork, shrimp, and yellow and green onions with a plateful of mixed greens, julienne-cut avocado, cucumber, and persimmon, and length-cut grape tomatoes…all garnished with roasted sunflower seeds, parsley, paprika coriander, and red pepper. A plate of warm and sunny feelings, even on a cool and light-starved day.

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Our Focus on Ensuring Equality

December 15, 2011

By Mark Lundegren

HumanaNatura encourages communities to dedicate themselves, in principle and practice, to a new modern goal of progressive health and quality of life for all. While a community mission or focus of this kind may have seemed unrealistic or unattainable in earlier times, today it has become within the reach of most communities in the developed world and many in the developing world as well. This essential change in our human condition is a result of advancing health-related science, industrial technology and affluence, higher educational levels, and democratic political systems.

To implement health-centered action within a community in this way, we recommend that political leaders and health advocates use a repeating multi-step process that has three key features: 1) ongoing development and implementation of a community health agenda, 2) pragmatic and increasing action on more than 100 HumanaNatura community health factors, and 3) ensuring three bedrock social conditions that naturally foster human health and well-being advancement – high social transparency, reciprocity, and equality.

While the community benefits of social transparency and reciprocity are fairly well-appreciated and intuitive to most of us in modern political and commercial life, the need for relatively high social equality is often a more exotic idea and today remains difficult for some of us to accept as a community health foundation. This is in part because of culture and socialization, including our mistaken equating of free markets with free societies, and in part because, instinctively, we naturally wish to be more rather than less advantaged and secure relative to others or our environment generally.

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Mice Are Natural Socialists

December 14, 2011

New research by the University of Chicago has many journalists and even some scientists buzzing, but it really shouldn’t have caused this reaction. In the study, scientists demonstrated compassionate or cooperative behavior between lab rats, notably their choosing to free a trapped comrade over food. Many of us expect rodents to behave more selfishly, even as significant science, including key principles of evolutionary theory, predicts the reverse.

When thinking about animal behavior, we often assume the Darwinian idea of survival of the fittest implies that life in nature is unendingly nasty and brutish, to use the famous words of Thomas Hobbes. But highly individualistic and competitive behaviors are only a starting point for natural life and generally signal more primitive states of natural selection and evolutionary progress.

In nature, as plants, animals, and even whole ecosystems evolve through either implicit or explicit competition and the gradual selection and transmission of beneficial traits, environmental niches available to simple, individualistic behaviors are steadily filled and then dominated by organisms specially optimized for these niches. If we look at the world around us, we can see that natural evolution does not stop at these primitive niches and instead begins to work around or above them.

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Warm & Cool Wherever You Are

December 13, 2011

Spicy chorizo and red onion omelet with arugula, mixed berries, and slivered almonds…garnished with parsley, paprika, coriander, anise, and black pepper. Warm, cool, delicious, and easy to prepare, whether it is warm or cool near you.